{"id":32777,"date":"2023-03-16T14:47:39","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T18:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=32777"},"modified":"2023-03-16T14:47:41","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T18:47:41","slug":"international-womens-day-2023-pioneering-street-nurse-urges-raising-voice-on-homelessness-at-apl-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/international-womens-day-2023-pioneering-street-nurse-urges-raising-voice-on-homelessness-at-apl-event\/","title":{"rendered":"International Women\u2019s Day 2023: Pioneering street nurse urges raising voice on homelessness at APL event"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One can\u2019t remain silent when it comes to the homeless and the unhoused; it\u2019s integral that people raise their voices to all levels of government to see real action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the message delivered by advocate Cathy Crowe, a Member of the Order of Canada, to a virtual audience hosted by the Aurora Public Library last Wednesday to mark International Women\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A well-known pioneer of street nursing and the author of A Knapsack Full of Dreams and Dying for a Home, Crowe has most recently focused her pen and her voice to highlight \u201cthe infrastructure of displacement\u201d as well as the voices of those with lived experience of homelessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe term \u2018Street Nurse\u2019 was coined over 30 years ago by a homeless man who saw a couple of us nurses at Sherbourne and Dundas in the heart of Downtown Toronto,\u201d Crowe told the Zoom audience during a question-and-answer session led by Reccia Mandelcorn, Manager of Community Collaboration for the Aurora public Library. \u201cWe were walking back from a meeting back to our office, a nursing clinic for people who were homeless, and he yelled across the street, \u2018Hey, Street Nurse,\u2019 and it was meant to be an absolute compliment as people did refer to their best friend, for example, as a Street Brother, Street Family \u2013 it was an absolute compliment and the term struck. While it doesn\u2019t encompass homeless families and children, for example, because they\u2019re not on the street. It is commonly understood to be a nurse that is practicing providing mostly health care to people who are homeless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Crowe says she gave up her active nursing license as a \u201cpolitical statement\u201d in solidarity with her fellow nurses against what she describes as \u201cdevastating policy decisions affecting healthcare\u201d by the Provincial government, she\u2019s still an RN who feels her \u201cwork is not yet finished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through her books, she says she wanted to leave a legacy for people of all ages, but particularly students to show that, with her own history in successful advocacy, there\u2019s \u201calways a step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is always something you can do and strategize on, so I wanted to give back that hope,\u201d she says. \u201cI think it is important to organize, it\u2019s important to teach organizing, it\u2019s important to teach political action in a way that is not academic, that is down to earth. I think I have tried to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To underscore her point, she cites a memorable quote from the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: \u201cA sword by itself rules nothing; it only comes alive in skilled hands.\u201d It\u2019s a line she says \u201cexpresses the sentiment of the human struggle for justice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I begin a chapter, I really describe how I learned nothing of this in nursing school about social justice and how to create campaigns or struggles. Fortunately, or a good chunk of my career I have seen political engagement as such an integral part of my job that I learned to do both.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her answer to the question on what power the individual might have to make a difference lies in what she said was her personal \u201cone-third-one-third-one-third\u201d formula.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThink about what is the issue that is close to your heart that you care about, that you want to make a difference on, or that you want to learn about. Think about allocating a third of your energy and your time, your letter-writing, maybe your donation to the downstream piece of that. In the case of homelessness, it would be donating to a local women\u2019s shelter or calling up a family shelter to say, \u2018What could our women\u2019s group collect for you?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe unhoused population, and not just in Toronto, is living in hell, and living in fear, and living in worsening health and risk of death. When I first began this work, I knew the name of every single person on the homeless memorial outside the Eaton Centre and there used to be one death every month or every couple of months. Now it\u2019s between 12 and 15 every month. The conditions in shelters in some cases, believe it or not, are worse than UN refugee camps and it is very difficult to show that. The biggest thing people don\u2019t understand is there\u2019s a lot of talk about right to housing but there\u2019s not a right to shelter. We have a right to housing in federal legislation which is a joke because it is clearly not happening, but we don\u2019t have a right to shelter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One can\u2019t remain silent when it comes to the homeless and the unhoused; it\u2019s integral that people raise their voices to all levels of government to see real action. That was the message delivered by advocate Cathy Crowe, a Member of the Order of Canada, to a virtual audience hosted by the Aurora Public Library […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-8wF","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-03 12:58:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}